It's really the same problem that we see with quantum physics -- the subject matter is esoteric enough that common sense can't be used to determine whether what you're listening to is really advanced theory or utter BS (or some combination of the two); they both sound the same, and the situation isn't helped by the presence of large numbers of people who think they know what they are talking about but don't. :/

I think the distinction they are making is between technology that kills people, and technology that entertains people. If someone fitted actual weapons to a Doom engine, they'd probably object.

Let's make the hopeful assumption that the superintelligent AIs will not "go rogue" in any way, but will correctly try to carry out their tasks as assigned by the people who designed and trained them.

Pretty much every major nation has military AIs, at this point. So the Chinese AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Americans, and the American AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Russians, and so on. In the final analysis, no matter where you live, there is probably an AI that has been explicitly tasked by its operators with figuring out the most effective ways to do you in. Not because they've "gone wrong", but because they're working as intended.

The size of the universe is increasing...
but the rate at which it is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate is decreasing is increasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate of the rate is decreasing in increasing...
[... and so on, ad infinitum...]

People commonly overestimate the possibility of "all humans dying", and simultaneously underestimate the possibility of "billions of humans dying".

People are like cockroaches that way; a disaster could wipe out 99% of us, and there would still be millions of us left to repopulate afterwards. To truly wipe out all humans would take something more severe than the asteroid that did for the dinosaurs.

Whoever set up its reward function, really. Could be any of the above. The technology doesn't care, it only follows its algorithm.

I'm not. $2K is an eye-watering amount to spend on a cell phone, even in 2026, and especially on a design that seems almost guaranteed to start wearing a vertical line into the display at the folding-point over time. I expect a number of Slashdot articles about unhappy Duo users demanding redress over that issue, even if everything else works as advertised.

Maybe in a better economy, people would splurge on something like this, but I don't think that's the zeitgest this season.

n/t

No doubt America has the resources to wreak havoc if it wanted to do so. OTOH, at this point, nobody in America (outside of Trump and Stephen Miller) wants to do so. A sufficiently popular and persuasive demagogue might change that, but Trump's debacle in Iran has demonstrated that he is not that person. I don't think JD Vance has what it takes to go "full Hitler" either, although I suppose he could (unpleasantly) surprise me.

... and the technology to algorithmically generate a plausible comments section for any Slashdot article is now commonplace.

The only way you'd be able to tell the difference is that in the AI-generated comment section, the AI posters wouldn't spend half of every post telling the previous poster how stupid they are.

Every time a 64-year-old has a birthday, the 65-and-over group's size increases by one. No rebirth required.

I agree, they should start small, and then steadily expand; pretty much the way Waymo is doing.

I'll believe they've sussed it when the number of Cybercabs on the road simultaneously is greater than the number of people Tesla could plausibly have hired to remotely babysit them; until then, there's always the possibility that they are doing the Mechanical Turk thing and their "full self-driving" cars are really "self-driving (supervised)". (It wouldn't be the first time; they've been caught pulling that trick with Optimus on multiple occasions)

If we assume there is meaningful competition between insurers, then any insurer that started charging "normal" drivers extravagant rates would start losing customers to its competitors who could easily undercut them on price. So the likely outcome would be that self-driving cars would get cheap insurance, and the rest of us would continue paying rates similar to what we pay now. In particular, the arrival of safe self-driving cars would presumably not result in human drivers having more accidents.

OTOH if there is not meaningful competition (e.g. due to a monopoly or oligopoly), then the insurance companies can charge anyone whatever price they like, because the only alternative to paying it would be to not drive a car. But that would be the case for both human-driven and self-driving cars.

You're only slightly exaggerating. In reality, the corporate overlords dream of printing piles of money and becoming vastly richer than they already are; monitoring and controlling the 'average' citizen is mainly a means to that end, rather than an end unto itself. A citizen that depends on your product to conduct his life is a citizen from which money can be regularly extracted!

Say that Chinese-made cars are banned from the USA, as described. What happens then? China licenses its auto technology to a European (or Mexican or etc) company, which then produces the same cars and sells those to the US, and the US manufacturers still have to either step up their game or get competed out of the market. The only way to avoid that reckoning would be to ban all foreign car imports entirely, which is probably where the Trump administration will start heading, sooner or later.